Wednesday, November 11, 2009

The last word on the 2009 mayoral race

This being Veterans Day, when we honor the men and women who put their lives on the line to defend our right to freedom and democracy, I thought it would be fitting to finally wrap up exactly what happened on November 3rd. Here we go...

* No matter that we consistently told everyone publicly he was leading by double digits, we knew that it was going to be very close. We did this to hurt Thompson's fund-raising and to convince as many Democrats as we could to not go anywhere near him."

So it really comes down to the fact that Bloomberg's extravagantly paid campaign staff knew how close the race was but spent money beyond all of our wildest imaginations and put out a lie.

Just as the team set out to distort Thompson's record, so did the team even distort the polls. One has to wonder why the pollsters went along with Wolfson and Sheeky and remained silent during the distortions. I will forever be convinced that the polls made a tremendous difference in this race. It allowed Democrats to be either mildly in support of Thompson or outright endorse Bloomberg.

The New York Times flat out blew their coverage of the mayor's race. Check out these screen shots from election night as the Times scrambles to recover from a combination of bad polling data and over zealously biased reporting:

At 9:54, the NY Times reports that Bloomberg has "decisively defeated" Thompson:

At 9:58 pm, they remove "decisively" and downgrade to simply, "defeated".

At 10:54 pm, the mayor now "appears to prevail," and the headline and story are bumped down a section.

The New York Times has been in Bloomberg's pocket since he first looked at extending term limits in August 2008, so it isn't surprising that they were a little over anxious to call the election for him so quickly in '09.

Michael Bloomberg's embarrassingly narrow victory margin last week may embolden Democrats to do in his third term something they largely refused to do this year: attack him.

With all the world assuming that the mayor was coasting toward a re-election landslide - and with polls showing him running even with (or even slightly ahead of) Bill Thompson among registered Democrats - most big-name Democrats, in New York and nationally, calculated that there was more to be lost than gained in going after Mr. Bloomberg.

But when Election Day rolled around, Mr. Bloomberg barely cleared the 50 percent mark, beating the woefully underfunded Democratic nominee by just 4.6 points - a far cry from the 19-point landslide he enjoyed in 2005. Had Mr. Bloomberg replicated, or even improved upon, that '05 performance this year, the Democratic love-fest would have continued well into his third term - even among his would-be Democratic successors.

Instead, though, last week's results have awakened Democrats (and the press) to the more complicated reality of Mr. Bloomberg's public standing in New York: In short, voters still generally approve of his performance - 70 percent of them, according to the exit poll conducted last week. (That number, it should be noted, is slightly inflated, given that the exit poll missed the closeness of the vote.) But they also resent his heavy-handedness, his obscene campaign spending and his transactional nature.

What's more, New Yorkers' growing personal distaste for their mayor will probably start dragging down his job approval rating soon. Lingering economic anxiety (barring a miraculous turnaround) and the seemingly inevitable voter fatigue that accompanies every third term practically ensures this.

At first glance I thought that chart was a chart for rich white people and everyone else. Look at the chart, all the neighborhoods that voted heavily for bloomberg are heavily white and those neighborhoods that voted for Thompson are all "minority" neighborhoods.

If you look at it real close you see that light skin people voted for bloomberg (except for hispanic light skinned) and dark skin people voted for Thompson.

Thompson should not have hired Nate Smith to oversee the underpaid canvassers. Nate, who is a staff member of what else? The Working Families Party, sent canvassers only into ghetto/black neighborhoods, East NY, the South Bronx & Jamaica. While white voters had no idea who Thompson is, Nate Smith wasted precious time preaching to the choir. Staff members were repeatedly harangued about bathroom and lunch breaks, were verbally abused and fired when they made reasonable requests such as requesting that they be paired up to knock on doors.

This is the man who lost the election for the Democrats.Thompson's campaign under Nate Smith's direction violated labor laws, forcing canvassers to sign bizarre agreements. Anyone want a copy?

When asked who he reports to, Nate's answer was no one. If that's true who the heck is Eddie Castell?

That was Thompson's major mistake, hiring Nate Smith who in turn put under 25 year olds from out of the city in positions of authority.

Crapper is under the delusion that the lumpen proletariat are falling over themselves to work for free for candidates. wake up Crapper. it's a paying proposition. some of us are the pros, the rest are just amateurs

Must be my bleary eyes playing tricks with me at 1 AM, but I kept reading "Eddie Castell" as "Eddie Haskell." I wonder if this Castell dude is as smarmy as the Haskell character (from "Leave It to Beaver," FYI).

I was so relieved that Bloomberg won. In the middle of a recession his experience with running a major company comes in handy. When someone is rich and successful it is a good thing, not a bad thing. They've done many things right to get to where they gotten. I'm not interested in the recently popular" vote for a minority just because they are a minority" movement. I'd rather vote for qualified leaders that can lead our cities and country in the right direction. Personally, I'm uninterested in the color of anyones skin, it means nothing. I'm more interested in intelligence, behavior and professionalism.

Really? And when was the last time you took your head out of your butt to see that he is headng this city down the path of destruction? I predict that sometime in the next 4 years, more people will be calling our home...NEW YORK SHITTY!!!

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